Thankfully follow-up chats with Lily revealed that she was indeed familiar with our work and was looking for a few less formal than your usual formal communion photos of her older girl and then have her change into casual attire and transition into a family portrait photography session.

Now that’s a plan we can easily sign up for! Bring it on!!!

We met at a local park in Miami and spent a couple of hours having a great time photographing Lily, Richard and their two adorable little girls.

Here are some of our favorites from the session:

Ok, and now an exclusive peek into how we roll…

We often hear from fellow photographers who are TERRIFIED at the idea of shooting children. Hum… ok, let me rephrase that… they’re terrified at the idea of “photographing” children he he he.

Of course this is a piece of cake for us for two reasons:

1. We have three delicious little ones of our own

2. They are BY FAR the hardest photographic subjects in the known universe (with the exception of black holes, which I hear cannot be photographed) because they know EXACTLY how to drive daddy and mommy up a wall (we don’t photograph as well when we’re up the wall)

At any rate… here are some tricks we can share on how to have a fun, productive session that involves children:

1. Child labor may be frowned upon by your local laws but if you do it really quick and don’t blog about it later complete with incriminating photographs you’re good: (here you see the youngest triggering the flash herself with the controller in her hand)

2. Art director? We don’t need no stinkin’ art director!

3. Promise the children something totally ridiculous. For example you could say something like “Ok, if we can get those two last shots I will then sit you on mommy’s lap, give you my camera and let you take photos of me as I roll on that patch of grass right there, like a crazy person” … now obviously I’m not the kind of dummy who would make such promises…. ’cause you know… they WILL REMEMBER and they WILL look at you with the same look the traffic court judge gives you when you plead NOT GUILTY and they will say “YOU PROMISED” … but you know… I’m just sayin…

Lily, Richard, thank you so much for trusting us with your family portraits. You can see the full set on our proof site. Click the link and then go to the Portraits area.

Many thanks go out to my friend and fellow photographer David Pun who was in town on his way back to New York from a Caribbean destination wedding. David came out with me and helped me during the session. The second communion photo up in the blog, and the two photos with me in them are his. Thanks David!!!

Holidays, holiday orders, some illnesses, confusion and other random things ended up delaying this set way more than Melissa and Pete could ever have been expected to wait.  And yet, with trepidation and infinite patience… they waited.  I guess all we can say is that now that they’re here… we hope they were worth the wait!

Thanks for trusting us with your family portraits. You can see the full set on our proof site. Click the link and then go to the Portraits area.

We’re super-excited to start the new year with this peek at this session with the Theodoropoulos|Bernal families. Though we had less time than we normally do on a portrait session, and had more people than we usually do, we were surprised by the number of images we fell in love with from this session. We’re showing a sampling here and the full set will be up within a week or so.

Quite possibly our favorite family group shot to date… the fellow photographers who follow our work will certainly see where i’m coming from with that!

Yvette and all, we hope your holidays were wonderful and that these were worth the wait. We’ll send you a facebook message once they’re all up.

Alessandro and Lisette

Didn’t call it a Sneak Peek as I normally would because this set has quite a few more images than a Sneak Peek.

I was only planning on posting maybe 4 images but I couldn’t make up my mind… so you get to see more now

These are from an awesome session with Melissa, Pete and their adorable little ones. What a gorgeous, fun family. The little ones are super-cute and it doesn’t take too much looking at them to see that they’re mini-me versions of mom and dad. Too cute!

I absolutely LOVE this one below of Dad and Keenan.  His expression is too much!

Here’s to hoping they were worth the wait

Oh and now looking back through the set, it’s curious how the kids for the most part are so serious…  I didn’t consciously pick them that way… but this is the first time we work with little ones that cooperate as well as they did while at the same time giving us such a variety of expressions…  so I think I subconsciously got instantly attracted to the more serious ones   we got some silly ones in the pipeline!

Alessandro and Lisette

Thanks for trusting us with creating your family portraits. We have quite a few more favorites for you to see in the next few days… let us know if these will tide you over

We had a great time photographing them and seeing how adorable their family interaction is.

I hope you guys love the images as much as we loved making them.  I can’t emphasize enough how priviledged we feel to have a family hire us to capture a moment in their lives.  Thanks guys for trusting us with your family portraits!

Alessandro and Lisette

Oh, of course all the photos from the session are on the proofs site now!  Head to the main proofs site and then look under Portraits.

Joe and Simone are a super-cute couple, friendliest people you’ll ever meet. We had an opportunity to shoot their family photos in some awesome locations in their development in Weston.

Their adorable (and super-stylin’) daughters were a blast to play with, they went along with all our ideas including a good 5 minutes holding a pose for a shot I wanted to get (not included in the sneak peek). Curly, the family dog, not featured in this sneak peek rounded up the group.

Simone, looking gorgeous… next to…  is that George Clooney?!?!

keep your eyes out for more… some EPIC portfolio material out of this session!!!

And of course, thank you Joe and Simone for trusting us with your family portraits!

We started off the session with his two brothers, Aiden and Logan… who are actually featured in one of our World Cup series potraits we haven’t posted yet… the three are a handful I’m sure, but they are incredibly adorable.

As you may have noticed in the first shot above, I decided to take this in a different direction than most one year old sessions you see out there.  My thinking was… how cool would an adorable one year old look if we shot him using the techniques usually reserved for Seniors and models?

I hope looking at the other photos that follow you’ll agree that the result was pretty epic!

Thank you Kristin for trusting us with documenting this special moment in your little one’s life.

Lisette and Alessandro

Oh yeah… all the images are on the proof site follow the link and then head to the portraits section.

There will be many other pumpkins and they will be special in their own way, but the sound of their little voices “those strings are disgusting!” “eww it stinks a lot” will echo through my memories for decades to come. I didn’t photograph the carving of the pumpkin … when I don’t have someone else there available to do it for me I prefer to live the moment rather than photograph it (which is why I no longer bring cameras to friends and family’s weddings when I’m there as a guest).

I knew I wanted what I call a “personal bookmark photo” … something that is hopefully beautiful in and of itself but that also has the magical power of unleashing wonderful memories that are not shown in the photos.

Here are my personal bookmarks:

From our family to yours have a safe and Happy Halloween!

Just a quick business note… those of you who have contacted us about scheduling your year end family portrait session… if you’re hoping to be able to get holiday cards in time to send them, time is of the essence to schedule your sessions   … especially if you’re only available on the weekends for the photography session!

Oh and a word of advice.. don’t leave a one and a half year old unsupervised with your jack-o-lantern… he may attempt to eat it whole

I have to admit this was the most challenging session we’ve ever shot. Those who have hired us know that our creativity thrives in the great outdoors.  Not that we don’t use flash… we do… but we love using natural light, natural and architectural found scenes… we are many things, but NOT “Studio Photographers”

You can imagine our state of mind as, upon arriving at Joanne and Doug’s home we realized the weather was NOT going to smile down on us and we were going to have to shoot all of it indoors, and all of it with flash… with a little bit of window light thrown in in the early parts of the session.

I hope you will agree that we pulled it off just fine. Norah and her big brother Brendyn look positively amazing and their parents were glowing as well… especially while holding their new bundle of joy.

If you enjoyed the photos please take a moment to leave a comment below for Joanne, Doug, Brendyn and baby Norah. Oh and we (the artists) would absolutely LOVE IT if you were to click that “Share” button floating off to the left and let your friends know about our work… that would be awesome!

the full set is up on the proofs site.

Lisette and Alessandro